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Innovations being developed at California Technical Institute and Oak Ridge National Lab received acclaim from President Obama in last night’s State of the Union address. Obama recognized these research centers as crucial players in the nation’s goal to solve the country’s energy crisis.

In his speech he stated:

“… if they assemble teams of the best minds in their fields, and focus on the hardest problems in clean energy, we’ll fund the Apollo Projects of our time. At the California Institute of Technology, they’re developing a way to turn sunlight and water into fuel for our cars. At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, they’re using supercomputers to get a lot more power out of our nuclear facilities. With more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil with biofuels, and become the first country to have 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.”

Obama was specifically referring to research I reported on last month, where Caltech’s Sossina Haile and her research team developed a prototype device that directly converts sun rays into fuels that can be stored.

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The University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Lab have teamed up to develop the Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education which combines energy science and engineering. Students will also take courses in related disciplines that their field will likely intersect. The goal is to educate and train future leaders armed to tackle domestic energy problems.

Students may chose to study nuclear energy, environmental and climate science, bioenergy and biofuels, renewable energy, energy conversion and storage, distributed energy and grid management, neutron science and computational science. They will also have to take courses in management, economics, R&D as well as broader technology and engineering coursework in order to prepare them for future job opportunities.

“More and more of the technology, the policy, the economics of energy-related things are going to dominate more and more careers of students,” says Lee Riedinger, physics professor and director of the center, in a recent interview with Knoxnews.com.

Thirty-eight faculty from UT and ORNL will lead the program. Students can also take advantage of the program’s emphasis on entrepreneurship. Riedinger is encouraging students that are interested to start their own companies as part of their educational experience at UT.

“It may mean the students will just take a course or maybe some courses for business administration or they may want to dabble with working with their professor at UT or Oak Ridge and use the fruits of their R&D to set up a small company. We’re not sure how that will go,” he said.

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ACerS Fellow Amit Goyal of Oak Ridge National Lab was named Innovator of the Year by R&D Magazine. An ACerS member since 1998, Goyal’s work is focused on high-temperature superconductivity.

R&D Magazine has given Goyal’s work much recognition, having honored his contributions to five R&D 100 Award-winning projects. Just this past year Goyal received two awards, one for his work on “High-performance, high-Tc superconducting wires enabled via self-assembly of nonsuperconducting columnar defects” and one for “Flexible, large-area, single crystal-Like, semiconductor substrates.”

According to an ORNL press release:

Goyal’s technical contributions have been in the area of large-area, low-cost, high-performance “flexible electronic” devices, including superconductor-based and semiconductor-based devices, in 3D self-assembly of nanodots of complex materials within another complex material for device applications, and in controlled synthesis of 1D and 3D nanoarrays for application.

Goyal’s contributions to the field of high-temperature superconducting materials includes solutions to achieving single-crystal-like behavior in long lengths of superconducting material. The greatest impact has been achieving these solutions in cost-effective and large-scale manners, so as to make them viable in manufacturing and viable in the marketplace. Goyal has also patented solutions to creating self-assembled nanoscale defects within superconductors to enhance their performance.

“It is a tremendous honor,” Goyal told the magazine. “The award represents an implicit responsibility of continuing to strive towards full commercialization of the innovations I have been involved with.”

Goyal, who also serves as vice-chair of ACerS’ Electronics Division, joined ORNL as a postdoctoral fellow in 1991 after completing his doctorate at the University of Rochester. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (Kharagpur) and received executive business training from Purdue University and the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Goyal will be honored at the 48th Annual R&D 100 Awards Banquet, on Nov. 11 in Orlando, Fla.

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Loops (seen above in blue) between graphene layers can be minimized using electron irradiation (bottom). (Credit: ORNL)

According to a press release, researchers at Oak Ridge National Lab have discovered how loops develop in graphene, an electrically conductive high-strength low-weight material that resembles an atomic-scale honeycomb. The nanoscale simulations are bringing scientists closer to using graphene in electronic applications.

“Graphene is a rising star in the materials world, given its potential for use in precise electronic components like transistors or other semiconductors,” says Bobby Sumpter, a staff scientist at ORNL.

Structural loops that sometimes form during a graphene cleaning process can render the material unsuitable for electronic applications.

However, when graphene was subjected to electron irradiation with a transmission electron microscope, it  prevented loop formation. The simulations showed that by injecting electrons to collect an image, the electrons were simultaneously changing the material’s structure.

“Taking a picture with a TEM is not merely taking a picture,” Sumpter says. “You might modify the picture at the same time that you’re looking at it.”

Graphene is only as good as the uniformity or cleanliness of its edges, which determine how effectively the material can transmit electrons. ORNL’s Vincent Meunier says the ability to efficiently clean graphene edges is crucial to using the material in electronics.

Recent experimental studies have shown that the Joule heating process can lead to undesirable loops that connect different graphene layers. Joule heating cleans graphene edges by running a current through the material. The team can show electron irradiation from a TEM prevents loop formation.

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The multimetallic nanoparticle created by Brown University chemists
for fuel-cell reactions uses a palladium core and an iron-platinum shell.
Credit: Sun Lab/Brown University

According to a Brown University press release, researchers have created a unique core-and-shell nanoparticle that uses less platinum yet performs more efficiently and lasts longer than commercially available pure-platinum catalysts at the cathode end of some fuel-cells.

A redox reaction takes place at the fuel cell’s cathode, where up to 40 percent of a fuel cell’s efficiency is lost, so, “this is a crucial step in making fuel cells a more competitive technology with internal combustion engines and batteries,” says Shouheng Sun, professor of chemistry at Brown and coauthor of the study.

The research team, which includes ACerS member and Oak Ridge National Lab researcher Karren L. More, Brown graduate student Vismadeb Mazumder and other investigators from ORNL, created a five-nanometer-wide palladium core and encircled it with a one-nanometer shell consisting of iron platinum (FePt).

The trick, Mazumder says, was in molding a shell that would retain its shape and require the smallest amount of platinum to pull off an efficient reaction. The researchers found a way to create a shell that uses only 30 percent platinum, although they expect to make thinner shells and use even less platinum.

In laboratory tests, the palladium/iron-platinum nanoparticles generated 12-times more current than commercially available pure-platinum catalysts at the same catalyst weight. The output also remained consistent over 10,000 cycles, at least 10 times longer than commercially available platinum models that begin to deteriorate after 1,000 cycles.

“This is a very good demonstration that catalysts with a core and a shell can be made readily in half-gram quantities in the lab. They’re active, and they last,” Mazumder says. “The next step is to scale them up for commercial use, and we are confident we’ll be able to do that.”

According to Sun, it is uncertain if the concept of enhanced catalysis from core/shell nanoparticles can be applied to a wide range of reactions seen in fuel cells. “Different fuel cells work in different conditions. I know our core/shell particles are good under the PEMFC conditions, but they may not survive the high operating temperature used in SOFCs.”

The findings have been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

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